Reviewing Inger Christensen's Essays in English at LARB

At Los Angeles Review of Books, Lowry Pressly looks at Inger Christensen's major works alongside The Condition of Secrecy (New Directions, 2018), the first collection of the poet's essays to appear in English. "The collection begins with a nostalgic paean to organized labor and collective well-being that is also the memoir of a child’s first summer vacations, and it ends with the book’s only poem," writes Pressly. More from this review:

Early on, Christensen presents us with the “string of glimpses, images, moments of awareness when summer became apparent and instilled itself in us.” The images that follow are a harmony of precision and evocation, and achieve a deft, almost musical balance between nostalgia, melancholy, and “a random, passing humanness, overcome by love and made mute.” Yellow slugs “moving like slow flames” on coke slag behind a gas works, boys and girls scraping the cracked dry earth with shards of porcelain, wide meadow, silent sea. And here is how Christensen ends that section, before moving on to the role that trade unions played in the evolution of her sensibility:

They’re three banal experiences, nothing out of the ordinary; many people must have seen and done the same things, but for me they stand out. They were for many years almost supernatural, are still nearly indescribable, and I know by now that I have to let them stay beyond words, because they’re about a child’s — a human being’s — in this case, my own — first aesthetic experiences. Even back when they first happened, these three images were already what I can now call them: three images — open, endless beauty; pointless energy; and the security of not being alone.

The next thing you know, she is describing a child’s impression of solidarity among the tradesmen who volunteered around the cottage, which was owned by the tailor’s union and opened to its members in turn. Another set of images, now of collective, collectivized effort, striking for Christensen precisely because of their naturalness in a world where they were under mortal threat...

Read on at LARB.